codefrog's recent activity
-
Comment on How to deal with a deep-rooted feeling of apathy? in ~health.mental
-
Comment on Can we get a ~UFOs or ~UAP ? in ~tildes
codefrog Link ParentThanks for the links. I think this is just me being unnecessarily pedantic. I really only hear the term deprecated in relation to software, which is my professional field. There it has a mostly...Thanks for the links.
I think this is just me being unnecessarily pedantic. I really only hear the term deprecated in relation to software, which is my professional field. There it has a mostly reliable meaning and the use of the word almost always means there is an announcement somewhere.
I'm going to stop being hung up on its usage here, and let people talk how they want for a while.
-
Comment on Can we get a ~UFOs or ~UAP ? in ~tildes
codefrog Link ParentYeah I know the new term has been all the rage. I was hoping OP's strong assertions of the why and how meant there was some official statement on the matter. I don't think so though.Yeah I know the new term has been all the rage. I was hoping OP's strong assertions of the why and how meant there was some official statement on the matter. I don't think so though.
-
Comment on Can we get a ~UFOs or ~UAP ? in ~tildes
codefrog Link ParentI'm out of the loop. Can you link me to where we deprecated UFOs?I'm out of the loop. Can you link me to where we deprecated UFOs?
-
Comment on How to deal with a deep-rooted feeling of apathy? in ~health.mental
codefrog Link ParentI think your post was pretty spot on, excepting only those two mentions. None of it really matters, figure out your own goals, probably figure out how to make more money. All good points. Except...I think your post was pretty spot on, excepting only those two mentions.
None of it really matters, figure out your own goals, probably figure out how to make more money.
All good points. Except the part where even though nothing matters, these couple things that serve others do matter. Too arbitrary for me is all.
-
Comment on How to deal with a deep-rooted feeling of apathy? in ~health.mental
codefrog Link ParentIf someone is only going to have two things that matter, I don't know if these would be the things.treating people nice and trying to minimize the harm you do
If someone is only going to have two things that matter, I don't know if these would be the things.
-
Comment on What are some of your favorite names for the users of Tildes? in ~talk
codefrog Link ParentThis seems to miss the spirit of the question; it's ok to have a little fun.This seems to miss the spirit of the question; it's ok to have a little fun.
-
Comment on How are you actually supposed to network / LinkedIn? in ~life
codefrog Link ParentHaha, I've thought about it a lot. Almost composed a reply like this a few times on that other site, but if you're not quick over there nobody will see the post, so the timing was never right.Haha, I've thought about it a lot. Almost composed a reply like this a few times on that other site, but if you're not quick over there nobody will see the post, so the timing was never right.
-
Comment on First time homebuyer who just closed on a house, does anyone have any general advice? in ~life.home_improvement
-
Comment on First time homebuyer who just closed on a house, does anyone have any general advice? in ~life.home_improvement
codefrog LinkDefinitely paint as much of the interior as you have time for before move-in. It's worth checking out what a cleaning service would charge to do a deep clean. I was really surprised when we ended...Definitely paint as much of the interior as you have time for before move-in.
It's worth checking out what a cleaning service would charge to do a deep clean. I was really surprised when we ended up paying I think $120 for a crew to come in and bang out our 2500 sq foot place. Worth it for the time we saved to do other things, but maybe we got lucky with the pricing.
If you have forced air heat or air conditioning, check the filters. Same with any water softeners or purifiers that might be installed, and thoroughly clean any humidifiers or dehumidifiers.
Learn where the main shutoffs are for any utilities that come into the house: electric, water, natural gas if you have it. Make sure everybody who lives in the house knows, and try to remember to inform any future house-sitters you may have, or if somebody comes over to feed pets or something while you go away.
Make a map of what all your circuit breakers are connected to. It's kind of a fun activity to do with somebody, one of you go around with a light plugging it into sockets and flipping lightswitches while the other trips the breakers and you yell at each other or text or whatever until you have figured out what they all are and know how to power down anything in the house when you need to work on it. This is easier to do before you start plugging in electronics and setting them up, so you don't have to set them up again after.
-
Comment on Things to consider when viewing a house, not in regards to inspection concerns? in ~life
codefrog LinkTheoretically, you could change a lot of things about the house or even the property. All the theorycrafting in the world can't change the surroundings though. Zillow and its cohorts have...Theoretically, you could change a lot of things about the house or even the property.
All the theorycrafting in the world can't change the surroundings though. Zillow and its cohorts have neighborhood meter kind of features to give you an idea, but nothing beats spending some time in the neighborhood with boots on the ground to really get the vibe of a place.
Is walkability important to you? It never occurred to me that the house I bought has nothing within a mile that isn't woods, a beach, or someone else's house; and it's another mile still before I get to a convenience store or a typical downtown area.
I would have bought it anyway since this is kind of what I did want, but still I underestimated how often I would randomly go out for a walk in my previous neighborhood.
Noise, like others have mentioned.
Traffic! If anybody in the house commutes to work or school during rush hour, try to cruise around the neighborhood during those hours and do a trial run of the commute. It's amazing how easily one shitty left turn can somewhere can create a backup that makes it take 10 extra minutes to get out of town every single day (or maybe worse, get back home in the evening), and you won't see it during Sunday's open house when the neighborhood is quiet.
-
Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk
codefrog Link ParentHell yeah, big fan of tmux the terminal multiplexer, for the following important and totally serious reasons: you can never do too much plexing if it's worth plexing, it's worth multiplexing plex...Hell yeah, big fan of tmux the terminal multiplexer, for the following important and totally serious reasons:
- you can never do too much plexing
- if it's worth plexing, it's worth multiplexing
- plex 'em if you got 'em
For real though, it's the first thing I install everywhere.
-
Comment on Nostalgia -- what programs do you miss? in ~tech
codefrog Link ParentI think Krita came onto the scene right around the time I gave up on any kind of graphic work and started doing exclusively backend work professionally. In the odd case that I want to spit out...I think Krita came onto the scene right around the time I gave up on any kind of graphic work and started doing exclusively backend work professionally.
In the odd case that I want to spit out some of my terrible graphic design, I just go to photopea.com these days and I don't have to install anything or care about it much.
-
Comment on How are you actually supposed to network / LinkedIn? in ~life
codefrog LinkI have gotten some my best jobs through linkedin, but I will make a few disclaimers first: I am in software. I don't know if your field has the same recruiter saturation on linkedin or if the...I have gotten some my best jobs through linkedin, but I will make a few disclaimers first:
I am in software. I don't know if your field has the same recruiter saturation on linkedin or if the methods around recruiting/hiring are similar.
I have a lot of experience to fill out on my linkedin profile, so that undoubtedly makes some of this advice easier.
Therefore, this whole long thing might be entirely worthless to you. I hope that's not true, but I'm posting anyway because some other lurker is certain to make use of it.
With the disclaimers out of the way, and apologies if this isn't fully applicable, here is how I use linkedin to find jobs.
I see advice, here and otherwise on the web, to reach out to individuals and try to "network" that way. I have not done this. It seems like it would work if you get lucky and make contact with the right person, so my opinion on that would be that it's probably an OK use of what would otherwise be downtime. I used to do some marketing-adjacent work, and cold outreach in general is usually measured such that single digit response rates are considered success. Most cold outreach gets ignored or shut down.
So I think yes, do try to make connections with people in the field who might become your bosses or teammates and start the kinds of conversations that others in the thread have suggested, but maybe don't make it your main activity, just because it can feel deflating to craft a bunch of well thought out messages and get few or no responses. I would think that on days when you plan to focus on career stuff, plan to spend some time doing other activities, and then some time also doing individual cold outreach.
I will say that I have had people randomly reach out to me a couple times asking questions about the field. I don't find it unwelcome or weird, and think I was able to offer at least a nonzero amount of helpful advice (ok maybe a little weird, but that's more of an "I'm nobody special" kind of imposter syndrome thing than anything else LOL). I also never directly helped anybody get hired, as unfortunately I was never at a place where they were looking for anything less than experienced devs at the time. That's a whole nother conversation and issue we have in tech, that is out of scope here.
Be active on the platform
OK so what do we definitely want to to? My number one thing I do when I am looking to interview, is be active on the platform. Like many social sites, there is an algorithm that linkedin uses to try and get everybody the most bang for their buck. I have repeatedly found that just visiting the website or clicking on mobile notifications to open the app, and clicking around on things, increases the amount of times I show up in searches and the amount of messages I receive.
It makes sense. Some professional is searching for XYZ (for me, that might be software developer): linkedin tracks and knows who is active. It is to everybody's benefit that the searcher more often sees people who are a decent match and also have been online reading and responding to messages, reading peoples content, searching for jobs; rather than somebody else who might look like a better match for the search, but swipes away or does not receive app notifications, rarely logs in, and has unread messages in their inbox.
So click around daily, behave interested. Answer every message. Click on the things that say how many people searched for you, even though they don't show you any useful information as a free user, stuff like that.
I like to change unimportant small details in the about section of my profile, so the profile itself seems "fresh," current, and active. I cannot know for sure if or to what extent this influences the algorithm, but it's such a small effort to do something like update "X years experience" to "X years professional experience" every few days, that I just do the activity.
Optimize profile for keywords
Put keywords in your profile at every opportunity. When I say keywords, I mean the words you expect someone to enter into a search box where you would want to be a result in their search.
For me, I am imagining a recruiter typing "software developer," "senior software engineer," at a high level. Then go deeper: there are a bunch of technologies, programming languages, database types, etc that they will also search for. There's tons of stuff that a person might type into that box. Whatever they type, I want those words to be present on my profile!
Keyword research
Keywords are great, and this is one of those pieces of advice that seems obvious once you have heard it.
It works better with more keywords. How to find keywords? Look at job postings.
Even as someone experienced in my field, I see new trends all the time in what kind of language people use. As an example, almost everything I have ever worked on has someplace where it is important and challenging to take bad data and make a best effort to turn it into good data. This has probably always been true, and will probably always continue to be true. What has changed over the years though, is how people describe that activity. I constantly see new phrases and acronyms pop up as people strive to express "deshittifying data" in the smartest way they can. The same thing seems to happen for "understand how to use a database."
Back on topic, the reason this is important is because we want that jargon on our profile so we match better for searches.
I don't know what that jargon is for your field, and maybe you do or don't, but there is probably a wealth of keywords that you have not considered or have taken for granted, that surface as you look at job postings with specific intent to identify and extract them. The people who are hiring now will give you the language they use, by using this same language themselves in their job postings!
It will be challenging as a new grad without experience to list, but try to get creative! You can say you studied [keyword], are interested in [keyword], volunteered at a place where [keyword] happens, etc.
Which leads nicely into the next section...
Bigger is better
In the USA where I am at least, the general advice for resume writing is to keep it short. Nobody is going to read it that thoroughly, the advice goes, and you could almost be considered to be disrespectfully wasting peoples' time if your resume is longer than one page early on or two pages once very experienced.
Indeed, my experiences have generally been that I have been repeatedly flabbergasted by the impression that an interviewer is seeing my resume for the first time during the interview itself. So for the resume, that is probably good advice, and I follow it myself.
This is not true on linkedin.
Load that profile up with anything you can! Each item is an opportunity to add more of those keywords.
It is still true that most people aren't going to read all of it. The difference here is, you aren't asking them to read it. If you send somebody a ten page resume, the understanding is that you're sending someone something with the expectation that they will be reading it (even though they probably won't LOL).
This is a social profile, the decision to actually read it is for the reader to make. All you are doing is giving them the option... and gaming the shit out of the algorithm to your own advantage to the best of your ability.
Your linkedin profile is not going to get you a job by itself. What your linkedin profile is going to do is get you conversations and interviews. That only happens when you show up in searches. Add to it, inflate it, get the words in there so that you show up in as many searches as possible.
Also, don't be shy about kind of inflating things to make them seem more important than they maybe really are. Nobody is background checking your linkedin profile. I am not saying to lie. Don't put jobs you didn't have or schools you did not attend... but do figure out how to list the name of, for example, a school you visited and took a single class or attended a talk. More. Bigger. Better.
I didn't actually attend college or university, so I don't know if that's a great example or how much something like that is useful in your field or how people search, but it can't hurt to have more opportunities to show up when people search.
An example that I can speak to from experience, is I have a professor friend who teaches programming and database stuff. He invited me to a hackathon he was bringing a dozen or so students to, so I went. It was fun.
The reality there, the story I told my people at home when they wondered what I was doing that day, is that I hung out with my buddy, met some cool 20-something year old kids and talked shop, and drank free red bulls for 24 hours.
On paper, that can easily become: volunteered at XYZ hackathon at ABC location, mentored [programming language] and [programming language] students with [popular cloud technology] who built an app using [well known API] from [well known company]" something something [type of database].
Now those keywords that showed up once or twice show up a few more times. The search engine loves this, and will deliver more eyeballs to your profile when people search. You probably see a pattern here by now.
Who am I targeting?
Who is supposed to be reading all this stuff and doing these searches?
Short answer: recruiters.
I treat linkedin mostly as pull, rather than push. There is an entire industry revolving around finding candidates and matching them to people with the power to make a hire. These people spend their entire workday searching for more people to have conversations with, and are under high pressure to keep candidate pipelines full.
Recruiters want you to interview with hiring managers. It's their whole thing, their paycheck depends on them moving candidates into and through these candidate pipelines.
This is why I target them rather than potential bosses or teammates. Yes, potential bosses or teammates might be able to short circuit some of the hiring process, but these people are busy doing their own thing, and not likely to be very interested in chatting with an unknown person very often.
Recruiters are also busy doing their own thing of course, but their thing is chatting with new unknown people and getting to know them just enough to find a reason to get them into conversations with the hiring officials!
Action steps
OK, optimizing the profile might be able to be done pretty quickly. It's beneficial to review and make at least small updates from time to time as mentioned above, but once the profile is looking good and loaded up with keywords, should we just sit on it and hope people find it?
Believe it or not, after a few years you will probably be getting messages from recruiters almost daily, and find them more of an annoyance than anything else. This is obviously unlikely on day one LOL
Now it's good to do a little pushing, and some searching of your own.
This is where my knowledge starts to break down, because honestly, it's almost too easy in tech. You will have to adapt to your industry accordingly.
In tech, we literally have people who call themselves "technical recruiters." So I can search linkedin for "technical recruiter" and get seemingly infinite results. I don't know if your field or other fields have an equivalent of that [my industry] recruiter title that people use.
There are a few other creative titles that I see people use often and I can search for:
- talent acquisition
- talent search specialist
- talent sourcing
- IT headhunting
Again, there is a supply and demand thing with software people where it kind of seems like they are kissing our ass a bit by calling us "talent." In other industries, this might not be a thing at all.
I would say look at companies in your industry, filter on people that work for those companies, and see what kinds of titles people have. Search for those titles, and connect with those people. It might even be that HR people also are responsible for bringing in new candidates instead of dedicated recruiters; I even see a little of that in tech at smaller and medium sized companies, and see people with dual linkedin titles like recruiter/HR.
HR is another department that loves to use cute titles these days. "People ops," "Director of employee happiness." All kinds of stuff. Look at the people in these positions in your industry and work the trends.
Anyway, find these people, connect with them, send them messages. Tell them your story. All you want out of them is an interview. Interviewing well is its own art, but it doesn't matter until you are getting interviews.
At the risk of repeating myself, these people actually want to hear from you. Tell them whatever it is, I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm changing careers, whatever your story is. Even the ones that can't help you today, the good ones have a memory like a steel trap (more likely they have a good organization system) and you will have some of them messaging you six months, a year, two years from now.
Pay attention to their feedback and refine your story accordingly until it starts getting you to the interview stage.
Ask them directly for feedback. Do you think I would be a good fit? If not, why not? Let them help you surface blind spots in your story.
Bonus
A lot of recruiters befriend other recruiters on linkedin, click around and see their connections, then connect with them too.Having more connections that are recruiters will help you with the algorithm. Linkedin generally tends to surface 1st and 2nd degree connections above everybody else. If you are connected to more recruiters, that's more opportunities for other recruiters to find you when they search for your keywords in the future.
Final pro tip, since linkedin search can suck sometimes
You can use google advanced operators to find people's profiles and get different results than the linkedin search.
Put into the google search bar
site:linkedin.com/in recruiter [keyword] [keyword]with some different keywords you have surfaced. Thelinkedin.com/inurl is how peoples individual profiles start, so that's pretty nice. If you start getting too many international profiles, you can explicitly make itwww.linkedin.com/in, which I think is only the US site.Be aware that sometimes google will give you a message like "we are seeing a lot of unusual traffic from you" when you do a lot of (sometimes even just a few) searches with the advanced operators, so it's best to do one or two, then go back to linkedin and do your other activities, and come back to google for more fancy searches after some time has passed.
I think that's all I got. Good luck!
-
Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk
-
Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk
codefrog LinkHuge vehicles. Like, why? People (here in America) are driving around these monstrous things that barely fit on the roads and are ridiculous to maneuver in parking lots, and I have no idea why....Huge vehicles. Like, why?
People (here in America) are driving around these monstrous things that barely fit on the roads and are ridiculous to maneuver in parking lots, and I have no idea why.
Some amount of people use their gigantic pickup trucks for truck stuff, and I can see the SUV being useful for those who are hauling around four kids and all their stuff, but both groups are pretty small compared to the amount of these huge vehicles driving around.
-
Comment on What's something you want to understand the appeal of? in ~talk
codefrog Link ParentMy wife only wears makeup on special occasions, but rosacea has been getting worse every summer, so now she has been trying to find something she doesn't hate to help cover it up, with not great...My wife only wears makeup on special occasions, but rosacea has been getting worse every summer, so now she has been trying to find something she doesn't hate to help cover it up, with not great success so far.
I got her a parasol, and tried to convince her that she would be the coolest chick in the neighborhood picking up the kids from school with her cool parasol, but the parasol has not left the house lol
-
Comment on Nostalgia -- what programs do you miss? in ~tech
codefrog Link ParentMacromedia had so much cool stuff going on. I tinkered with dreamweaver way in it's early days, and when I wanted to dabble in graphics I would use fireworks. It was the best of both worlds, with...Macromedia had so much cool stuff going on.
I tinkered with dreamweaver way in it's early days, and when I wanted to dabble in graphics I would use fireworks. It was the best of both worlds, with raster and vector tools. I would tell people it was a combination of photoshop and illustrator.
When adobe absorbed all the Macromedia stuff, they discontinued fireworks. I hung onto my aging old version for a long while, until such a time when I stopped doing graphics because I suck at it lol
-
Comment on <deleted topic> in ~life.men
codefrog Link ParentHey now, I didn't even say not like, just not always agree. Imagine how boring it would be if everybody always agreed!Hey now, I didn't even say not like, just not always agree. Imagine how boring it would be if everybody always agreed!
-
Comment on <deleted topic> in ~life.men
codefrog Link ParentYa know, as much as I may not always agree with you, I have to admit that I appreciate you. We only got four choices; you might have more fight in you than you think ;)Ya know, as much as I may not always agree with you, I have to admit that I appreciate you.
We only got four choices; you might have more fight in you than you think ;)
I do believe that less suffering is good.
I have had my ups and downs like a lot of people, and I've had times where I feel good about things and have a direction and some semblance that going through whatever motions I am going through are generally worthwhile.
I've also had times where I'm not so sure. Times where I think about how none of this really matters and the motions are more of a struggle.
I've just never had times where I think none of this matters except that I be nice to people. That sounds worse to me than just plain old none of this matters. I hope people who are in that place are doing ok.